Steve Doerschuk: This one hurt a lot more than the cold

Wednesday

Jan 8, 2014 at 12:39 AM

Tuesday brought brutal cold to Stark County and thawed Browns writer Steve Doerschuk's memory of scraping ice off a window to see a famous playoff game. How cold was it? One player's frozen mustache broke off.

Steve Doerschuk CantonRep.com sports writer @sdoerschukREP

I'll be sledding up to New Jersey for the Super Bowl in a few weeks. All one can do is laugh about what it will be like if the weather is like Tuesday's.

Those of us who attended the "Red Right 88" game in Cleveland still are laughing.

Many will say it stands as the coldest day of our lives.

The weather was just like Tuesday's. It was a January 33 years ago.

Quarterback Brian Sipe was the hottest thing going. The wind chill was minus-33.

Browns fans had suffered long enough. It had been an eternity, more than a decade, since the Super Bowl began, and by golly, the Browns were going.

The Browns' first playoff game in eight years was against Oakland. I went as a young writer accompanying Sports Editor Bob Stewart.

The paper had two writer credentials. Stew's was in the heated press box atop the south side of Municipal Stadium. Mine was in the unheated baseball press box.

Kicker Don Cockroft, now a Stark County resident, spent the afternoon in the great outdoors.

From Don's book "The 1980 Kardiac Kids" ...

n Cornerback Ron Bolton: "When they said we were going to play, I said, "Oh my God!"

n Sipe: "I thought if the NFL was ever going to postpone a game, it would be this one."

Kickoff was on time. Time froze as the arctic epic played out. Before one play, Raiders linebacker Matt Millen broke off half his mustache simply by wiping his face.

I shivered next to Danny Coughlin in that deep freeze of a baseball press box. It was no great football perch any day, far behind the west end zone. On this day, the view was comical.

We were glad to be behind a window, as it kept out the brutal wind, but afraid to breathe. The human vapor froze over the glass the moment it escaped.

Danny and I took turns scraping ice with notebooks and fingernails. It was hard to keep up. After halftime, he disappeared. I've seen him out and about over the years, so I assume he lived.

Tight end Ozzie Newsome used TV timeouts to bolt to sideline heaters. After a while, Nanook of the North clothes and electro-socks weren't enough. I couldn't stand the cold.

The TV network had a small heated room downstairs, a long way from the press box entrance. Getting there without missing much action required sprinting, full bore, down the stadium ramps, stealing a minute of network heat, and sprinting back up to the frozen window.

The stadium was full. The atmosphere something Jimmy Haslam and Joe Banner perhaps see in their dreams.

Ron Bolton's pick-six (not a term then), a missed extra point and two Cockroft field goals led to a 12-7 Browns lead going into the fourth quarter. The sound of 77,655 people (as the crowd was announced, meaning hundreds stayed home) was as warm as the air was cold.

Mark van Eeghen's second touchdown run put Oakland on top, 14-12. Yet, that whole season had been about last-minute rallies. There was a sense that not even a Titanic ice mass could stop one here.

The Browns drove.

Back then, writers emptied onto the sidelines with five minutes left. That is where we watched — from a vantage point closer than the players not in the game, frozen out of our gourds — Sipe throw the interception that lives in infamy, with 41 seconds left.

We trudged from the field to the Browns' locker room. There, writers and wide receivers had this in common: We were numb; we shivered uncontrollably.

There was no Internet to feed back then. On an afternoon-newspaper deadline, Stew drove us back to the warmth of the office in Canton.

Eager to capture history, I tapped out a paragraph about "the best laid schemes of mice and men" having gone astray.

I attributed the passage to Shakespeare. Learned readers later pointed out the mistake. "Of mice and men," they noted, traces to Robert Burns.